Leader, Manager, Thinker, Tinkerer, Human…

Random People ask me all the time these questions, but when someone fresh asks this of me in a personal way — I have to answer the best way I know how…

Right here:

What is the difference between being a Leader and being a Manager?

Is it better to be a good Leader or a great Manager?

Could You be both?

What is more useful for the person?

What is more useful for the Business Enterprise?

What is more useful for the Social Enterprise?

What type of person are you?

What type of Success are you seeking?

All these questions above are interesting but here bellow are the right questions to be asked.

They are the right questions to ask… even though you see no question marks and are just questions that will pop up in your brain, as you go on reading.

So Go On and Read as if your Life depended on it.

Because some day it just might be…

Imagine this scenario:

You are deep down in a coal mine shaft trapped and with not much prospect of quick rescue.

You are a few miles deep inside the earth and it’s hot and humid.

And you have no way to come up.

But there is a “delivery” tube that can handle one item to you.

What do you want the most?

Mind you that you can ask for only one thing to get delivered to you.

What will it be?

Food or Water?

Think & Decide…

Take your pick now.

…

….

…

You choose one or the other…

…

…

…

After your choice get delivered,

Sadly,

You Are Dead.

….

You are dead because of your choice.

Because whatever you choose to save your Life from the choices above is wrong.

Dead as a doornail — You know Life — Those are the breaks…

You are dead because whatever you asked to get delivered to you deep down inside the mine shaft – you would be wrong.

Both questions are wrong.

Water and food are useless to you down there.

You’ll die even if you have plenty of both.

You’ve got to ask a different question, if you want to live.

To survive…

You must ask a different question.

You must think anew and then ask the right question in order to get what is absolutely necessary and right for you. A question that is not part of the usual choices…

Because when you are trapped down inside the bowels of the earth stuck in the mine shaft — you need to ask for AIR.

That alone will save you.

If there is a delivery tube that can handle one thing — that one thing has got to be breathable AIR.

You need AIR to breath.

Everything else is useless if you don’t have that.

Got It?

You know that can’t have it all. That is true not only in your job, but in your life as well. But you absolutely must have to have what you need… to survive.

But first You’ve got to be able to discern what is absolutely necessary and useful to You… and then ask for it.

Same here with Leadership and management or anything else in Life. You’ve got to be able to decide quickly what you want from Life and what you must give up, in order to have what you absolutely NEED in order to survive and thrive.

Decide first what your drink should be — and then seek to fill up your water bottle. But if you can’t take the vital breath of air — you Dead sucker.

So breath and breath again. And then worry about liquids. Or solids. And when you get there — please don’t drink other people’s Cool-Aid just because they are drunk on it themselves.

Find your purpose and all, but don’t waste your time on it. Go ahead and make a decision first, if this is what your Life need right now. Purpose and all that spiritual mumbo-jumbo will be all sorted later…

And You have to do this directly yourself — not via others. Those o called reps seldom do you any good, unless they are the kind that gives you a good massage with a Happy End…

And to prove the point, happy end and all is great but how do you put so much trust in any of those “reps” really to help you with the higher Stuff?

So please ponder this for a while:

Who are your reps?

Is it FOX news?

Or is it Hollywood?

Or maybe colleagues and the newspapers?

Or is it your Family, School, and Society?

So maybe these are all good reps for you, but what do you look for when asking parents, teachers, gyrus, wives, husbands, sibling, managers, leaders, officers, judges, counselors, psychologists, stupid life coaches, professors, Doctors, and all others, who want to make you something that you are not?

Well, all these might be good “Reps” for socialization, but You’ve got to be yourself. First BE YOURSELF.

Later, you can look for a lot of things. Much later and once you have some help, you can start adding to your foundation. And the Good Doctor and the Good Professor, and the Good Mama, are all GREAT to have but you can listen to them up to a limit. You’ve got to be discerning and take from Life only what is good for you…

Take All You Need… But please don’t be a cad.

Give and give freely. Give up things too. This way by “giving” you learn more about Life than by “taking” any day of the week.

With dozens of years leading people, and enterprises, along with hundreds of start-ups that are both Social and Business enterprises — I have churned through thousands of people, and I’ve boiled the key criteria to leading and managing down to Just Two.

Here’s all you need to know to qualify the people that can help you excel and move forth.

#1 — Would YOU buy anything from this person? Would you buy whatever is that they are selling? Later as you add things on the foundation of your character, you’ll find it takes a village of helpers to build your “character home”.

#2 — Does he or she have at least some years of experience helping people set themselves up in Life and has a Good Track Record to help people out successfully and to assist them in Growing into a healthy and Successful Human Being?

After you finish reading this you’ll understand that sometime even your own Lover, your own blood, your own Mother and Father, your own Husband or Wife, your Bosses, Investors, Colleagues, and even your own blood children — they all have no clue about helping you out and even though they might want what’ bet for you — they are causing you horrible damage by holding you back or steering you to an existence that is not meant for you…

We all know what’ right and wrong. We all know what is to be done…

Got that?

Later, once you are solid and your “character home” has been built firmly on that foundation we spoke about — you can hire all types of “help” to get ideas and push your Life forward.

Later, you can even allow folks to come and go freely into your Life-home, without listening to their screaming their head off to wanna make you follow the latest craze that hit the internet…

You know the fads. Like the 90’s Aerobic craze that Bill Clinton was doing with the cigar and Monica. And then it was Hillary’s pantsuits. After seeing that — can you blame Billy? Yesterday was “lifting” and a little earlier today was “All Things Excellence” and today is “Yoga” tomorrow is “Purpose” and the next day is “Zumba” ad infinitum…

But all these fads are there and are sold to you for a reason. They all have their purpose. Their purpose is to neutralize you. They want to render you ineffective. They want to make you impotent. They want you to waste your Life sitting in front of the TV or in front of FB, or in some yoga class some place stretching into a HATHA cat or dog pose, all the while thinking you found GOD> They in short want you to wate your Life in any way you can. Maybe going down that path wearing a leotard and Lululemon see through panties, is your thing. But…
And although lululemon tights and assorted yoga pants are hugely entertaining as far as eye-candy goes — it’s still a huge crime as far as Fashion Police is concerned.

So please don’t accept advise from “people” that haven’t gotten anyone directly GREAT before, you hire them, or that their Life is punched full of holes, you can see the sun through. And as it turns out these people are usually smoking all manner of dope – medicinal or otherwise, and it all gets really confusing really fast.

And if you are still bent to hiring the Life Coach useless types to redo your closets — please get them into entry level “jobs” first. Get them to clean the cobwebs, and to assume the important roles of window washers and window dressers extraordinaires, before you let them monkey with your necktop computer, and your valuable Brain Software.

Because they just might drive you crazy…

Much like they drive themselves to the nut house, with a certain regularity and Swiss Clock precision frequency.

So please, do your own thing. Do it for yourself and put down the internet and stop searching for the next “Guru” or the next purposeful fad to FIX your Life.

You are alright as you are. As a Matter of fact — you are great. You’ve made it this far. You are reading this blog. You are a leader already. That’s the way to live. It’s all OK. And everything is gonna be alright…

Like in the early days, when LIFE taught you everything. You can still learn the best things from her. Observe NATURE and you’ll learn everything you need to know. Because hiring someone to observe and tell you what they see — is Not Good. You’ve got to do this yourself….

You can ask lots of questions from anyone later, once you have built your home. But without asking the Right Questions #1 and #2 — it’s too risky to get anyone to help you.

They’ll fail, and you will pay the price — because you are the “home remodelling project” here.

Got that?

And then You won’t trust people anymore and you will not understand them, and worse yet you’ll be back to Square One.

You won’t be able to Love either…

And you can’t afford that.

As far as managing and leading — well — you know that already too…

Yours,

Pano

PS:

We live in a complex world.

To navigate this world, You need to be intuitive and incisive.

That’s All.

Being a Good Leader and a Great Manager covers all that and let’s you go through Life like a compassionate Samurai, cutting quickly through the bullshit, and getting to serve the real Principles of our Nature.

What does it takes to manage?

Managing human capital well is not management in my book. For me MANAGEMENT means grappling with people. Simple as that. And then on top of that you must layer it with being able to deal well with more ambiguity than most of us are comfortable with. It also means letting go of simplistic rules and certainties that have the advantage of making us feel steady and secure – ideologies, for example – in favour of nuance, underlying themes, overarching principles, and finding what might be called “a third way” when dealing with challenges that tend to have “two sides”. Even dealing with slow growth and incremental progress requires a greater degree of self-management in the form of patience in the face of uncertainty, the ability to maintain and communicate an optimistic view, and the strategic vision to grasp the less obvious opportunities and persevere to achieve them. This is an uncertain and tough terrain – contrast this reality with the abundance of the dotcom boom.

This new terrain is both cognitively and emotionally more difficult, but journeying across it expands our understanding of others and of ourselves, even as it takes us to a higher level of leadership.

And always remember that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Given that the demands many Great Managers face today are well beyond the limits of any one individual’s capacity, one of the most important qualities is an interest in collaboration, leveraging shared efforts and group processes. Whereas in the mid-20th century, the caricature of the heroic CEO was not too far from reality, in today’s complex systems, leadership itself must be viewed as more of a network phenomenon. As such, the best thing executives can do is to promote an environment that encourages deep dialogue, recognizes diverse perspectives, and values pooled creativity that cuts across boundaries. To create these conditions, leaders must be skilled at building trust, listening, seeking to understand, and having the humility to acknowledge uncertainty and the need for others. Tapping resources in this way magnifies and complements a leader’s strengths and power, allowing them to better manage complexity and have a positive impact. The point is that a greater degree of sophistication in a person’s understanding of and management of self and the world – what we might call “complexity of self” or simply “maturity” – directly influences how a person leads teams, negotiates, manages change, makes decisions, handles competing priorities and stakeholder interests, navigates relationships, and deals with emotional stress. Complexity of self is achieved by seeking growth and development, welcoming challenging experiences that stretch one’s understanding and equilibrium, exposing oneself to multiple perspectives, seeking and accepting feedback, listening and reflecting and, importantly, taking the risk of acting amidst uncertainty with the best of intentions for the good of the whole system, not just one’s own domain.

So what does it take to lead?

First and foremost, it takes maturity. Mature leaders handle complexity well because they themselves are more complex – in their thinking, identities, emotional management, behavioural repertoire and social competence. Mature leaders don’t have simple views of themselves. They don’t oversimplify their role or their personality. Mature leaders have changed and developed over time and they are aware that there has been an evolution. Being a business leader in a complex world means understanding that the role goes beyond the confines of an individual company, enterprise, or tribe, family & household, because these leaders also have a responsibility to help define wider societal goals, in their family, tribe, local community, and far beyond their circle of influence…